[WhoCares]

Has anyone played yet? I am still wating for my copy (Damm you Amazon) but cant wait to put my hands on it.

[Chefelf]

I've heard a few scattered negative things about it but I'm still dying to play it.

[use the force]

^^^^


Noooo whats wrong about it?

[Jordan]

I can't get it till feburary since I don't have an Xbox. It looks pretty damn sweet. I've heard that it's a bit buggy. But that's nothing a well made patch can't clean-up.

I've heard the story is excellent (ign.com) I would not mind it one bit if the engine was the exact same but with different story. That turn based real time system is amazing.

[SimeSublime]

I'm with you Jordan, bring on Feburary. The PC version of the first was later, but it had Yavin IV added in. So sure we have to wait, but we may get something extra.

[Helena]

I almost certainly won't be playing KOTOR 2. I was sure I'd hate the story as soon as I heard the first details about it, so I checked the forums at some KOTOR fansites for spoilers - and yes, I hate it. Without giving away anything major, it's basically a done-to-death 'post-apocalypse' scenario which makes a complete mockery of both endings of the first game (particularly the Light Side ending) and has the nerve to rehash plot elements from the original (amnesiac PC, mysterious unknown source fuelling the Sith's power, etc.) IMO it sounded more like a piece of speculative fan fiction than a proper sequel.

It may be a great game in some ways, but frankly I'd rather not play it at all than have it spoil the original KOTOR for me. Yeah, I know I'm pathetic for getting so obsessive about a computer game. So sue me...

[Chefelf]

I've heard that it's a bit buggy. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well if it's anythink like the first game it will be VERY buggy. The first game was probably one of the buggiest games I remember playing. I recall the mission on Dagobah when you have to unite the two feuding families. For some reason the second family vanished when I was playing and then I had to go back and they gave me the whole sob story again. I had to do that stupid side quest TWICE.

Man, I hated those families. The deserved each other.

It may be a great game in some ways, but frankly I'd rather not play it at all than have it spoil the original KOTOR for me. Yeah, I know I'm pathetic for getting so obsessive about a computer game. So sue me...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's perfectly acceptable to be obsessive about KOTOR. It was a great game.

[Helena]

It's perfectly acceptable to be obsessive about KOTOR.  It was a great game.

Thanks, Chefelf. I feel validated now.

To try and explain... I feel pretty much the same way about KOTOR as most of you guys do about the original Star Wars trilogy. So I'm incredibly annoyed about the cavalier attitude Obsidian seem to have adopted towards the characters and plotlines from the original game, like Lucas with the prequels (though obviously not on anything like the same scale). I'm just not prepared to accept that I spent 40 hours on the first game, only to have the sequel push the reset button and undo all the work I did - so I prefer just to ignore it and stick to my own ideas of what happened next.

[SimeSublime]

I've mostly limited my intake on the game, as I hate spoilers, so I may be completely off here.

I thought the entire first game was hinting at something happening in the background. We don't know what turned Revan to the dark side. Sure, he found the Star Forge, but as Malak said at the end, Revan just thought it was a factory. The Jedi Council stayed out of the Mandalorian Wars because they sensed a more sinister power behind it. Hell, even Canderous made a comment about some other power(not the meteor story, I mean another power/race/nation suggesting attacking the Republic). Whilst playing the first game, I had the feeling that all we were doing was just winning a temporary reprise, and whatever was actually happening had set everything up to weaken the Republic for it's own attack. Sure, you went to a lot of effort to free the Republic from the Sith, but as Jolee would have told you, everyone thinks their battle is the most important thing in the universe.

[Helena]

It's not another power/race/nation that's attacking the Republic in KOTOR 2; it's still the Sith. And no, we don't know exactly what turned Revan to the Dark Side, but I thought it was made pretty clear that the Star Forge was the 'sinister power' the Jedi were talking about - after all, Malak himself explained that the SF was not just a 'factory' as Revan thought, but something far more powerful. The ending of KOTOR wrapped everything up neatly, and as far as I'm concerned, saying 'oh no, it wasn't the Star Forge actually, it was something else' rather than coming up with a new story is just sheer laziness.

But what really, really pisses me off is the way that KOTOR 2 basically renders everything you did in the first game completely irrelevant. No two ways about it: if you took the Dark Side ending of the original game then the Republic should not even exist five years later; if you took the Light Side ending then the Sith should be long gone. There is no way to reconcile the two, and anyone making a sequel should either have a) taken one ending and stuck with it, or b) set it a few hundred or so years later, so that you can just assume that things got back to normal whatever happened to Revan. But as it is, it doesn't matter whether I virtually destroyed the Sith in the first game, since according to the sequel the outcome five years later is precisely the same as if I'd become the Dark Lord and slaughtered the entire Republic fleet. OK, so maybe a handful of characters survived who wouldn't have otherwise, but what difference does that make in the grand scheme of things?

I can understand that the final battle of KOTOR would not end the war immediately, just like the destruction of the Death Star in ANH. I could even have accepted Obsidian wanting to make a 'darker' sequel, as with ESB, although personally I thought the first game was quite dark enough for Star Wars. But even ESB didn't try to make out that what happened in the first film was irrelevant and that the Rebels' achievments meant nothing. This is what really angers me about the KOTOR 2 storyline, even more than the contrived setup or the clichéd 'doom-and-gloom' scenario (the Republic's pretty much collapsed and there's only a handful of Jedi left in the galaxy - sound familiar?)

[Laughlyn]

You make a fair few points there, but as a survivor of the old Star wars PNP rpg, I've seen the developers problem before, There's only so many times you can blow up a death star. The star forge is like the valley of the jedi from JK2. a plot device. When the games over the developers realise they're going to have a hard time explaining away something so powerful so they just cover up the cracks. Sure, it's no excuse to just say the original didn't happen, but you've got to make a sequel somehow.

KOTOR captured the feel of the series perfectly, but picking up from the end of an existing game is always difficult. look at the mess they made of baldurs gate. You probably finished the game as a level 18+ killing machine, that's a hard thing to challenge. The amnesia stuff could be done without for sure, and the jedi apocalypse thing is just getting old.

As for presenting a darker appeal, it's an unfortunate sign of the times, look at prince of persia.

I guess at least they could have your old character turn up as the last boss, That'd really screw you over.

Either way, I'd still suggest you play it. If you don't, you'l never know what you could be missing.

(and if you'd like to join me in burning down the developers offices afterwards, I'll bring the petrol).

[Helena]

I agree that it would be hard to come up with a good plot to follow the first game - which is why, as I said, they should have set it a long time later and just made up a new story. There are 4000 years between the events of KOTOR and the events in the movies, so it wouldn't have been difficult. Or why not go back in time, to the Exar Kun wars for example?

As for burning down the developers' offices, I don't have the energy. Like I said, I'd rather just ignore it altogether and make up my own version of what happened after the first game. I can live without playing the sequel - I have plenty of other games to play at present, and if I get desperate for a KOTOR fix I can always replay the original.

[SimeSublime]

Well, I'm still waiting in anticipation for February, regardless. I've already made my argument for why I'm only slightly disapointed at what I know about the plot, and I figure the game will hopefully be good enough to get past it. And regardless of how bad the sequal is, it can't detract from my experience of the first.

[Laughlyn]

Hey you can always hope for a 3rd game. or a prequel.

[barend]

my PC is pretty top of the line, but it had enough trouble doing KOTOR 1... it would take some kind 'Deep Thought'esque supercomputer to take a sequel...